More than 1,000 specimens were subjected to various cognitive tests by a team of scientists
Although the Border Collie, due to its excellent herding work, is often considered the dog smartest in the worldscientists have just discovered that another race holds this honor: the Belgian Malinois may be the smartest canineaccording to tests carried out among more than 1,000 specimens of 13 breeds.
The Malionis make a superb sniffer, watchdog, and police dog, and they are also known for being independent, problem solvers, and quick to respond to needs. They also stand out for being experts in understanding humans.
Scientists from the University of Helsinki in Finland have created the most comprehensive data set to date on cognitive aspects of different breeds.
More of 1,000 dogs of 13 different breeds were tested in a total of 10 tasks (seven cognitive and three behavioral). and then they were evaluated by experts who had created the battery of tests called smartDOG.
“Most breeds had their own strengths and weaknesses,” Saara Junttila, study author and doctoral researcher in canine cognition at the University of Helsinki, told The Telegraph in Britain.
“For example, the Labrador Retriever is very good at reading human gestures, but not so good at solving spatial problems.
“Some breeds, such as the Shetland Sheepdog, scored fairly evenly in almost all tests; that is, they did not obtain very high or very low scores in any test& rdquor ;.
“The Belgian Malinois excelled on many of the cognitive tasks, performing very well on most of them,” added study author Katriina Tiira, owner and CEO of smartDOG.
“The border collies also performed well in many of the tests,” he added.
The only test that the team felt would be the best indicator of the animal’s general intelligence was the logical reasoning test, in which the dog was shown two bowls of food and could see that one was empty.
The idea was to see if he could infer that the food was in the other bowl, which was covered. But the data revealed that there was no difference between the different breeds of dogs when it came to solving this task.
But later The researchers used three tasks, each of which tested a specific aspect of the dog’s cognition.and then it was shown how the races differed from each other.
A V-detour task, where the dog has to detour around a transparent V-shaped fence to access a food reward it can already see, partly measures problem-solving ability.
Human gesture reading ability was measured by evaluating how the dogs responded to five human gestures: constant pointing, brief pointing, foot pointing, pointing while looking in another direction, and following our gaze.
The researchers also investigated how independent a dog is and how quickly they turn to a human for help. An unsolvable task (trying to access food in a box that cannot be opened) was used for this trait.
The understanding of human gestures is a measure of social cognitionso the dogs that solved that task well are good at reading and understanding humans,” Junttila said.
“The unsolvable task also measured a social aspect; some breeds scored very high on human-directed behavior, meaning they attempted to ask the human for help with the difficult task, while at the other extreme, dogs attempted to solve the problem independently. Both responses can be useful in different situations.”
The malinois, champion
The Belgian Malinois ranked first in both the human gestures and V-turning task, the data shows, and was the fifth most independent breed.
On the general intelligence score, the Malinois achieved first place with 35 points out of a maximum of 39.Border collies lived up to their reputation, coming in a worthy second with 26 pointswhile Hovawart got the bronze medal with 25 points, one point ahead of the Spanish Water Dog.
The Golden Retriever and the Labrador, known for their emotional intuition, scored high on the gesture test but low on the other two, coming in 13th and 9th, respectively.
But the research team says that trait-specific and general intelligence rankings aren’t as helpful as knowing which breeds are better at certain skills than others.
Reference study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-26991-5
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